


Murder on the Windy Planet: a story of love, mystery, and mimosas

by howlikeagod



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Case Fic, Established Relationship, M/M, Vacation, kind of?, possibly deserving of Violence and Mild Gore warnings, putting my 13 year old self's agatha christie obsession to good use for once
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-21 00:53:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14273394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howlikeagod/pseuds/howlikeagod
Summary: What do you get when you mix two free tickets to a Venusian spa and resort, a master thief, a private eye, several suspicious birds, and a small dog in a handbag? A case, of course!Or: Juno Steel is finally forced to take a vacation.





	Murder on the Windy Planet: a story of love, mystery, and mimosas

**Author's Note:**

> I'm mostly posting this first chapter as a promise to myself and all of you that I will finish this fic eventually. I have a longer one I'm devoting more time to currently, but it's been a long while since I've posted anything here. Have something... fluffy? For once.
> 
> Thanks so much to [spicybruha](https://spicybruha.tumblr.com/post/180617929789/if-yall-havent-read-eternalgirlscouts) for this gorgeous art for chapter 1!

“—and of  _ course  _ I knew the answer to last week’s trivia—I mean, who  _ doesn’t  _ know that Alexia and Gail kissed for the first time on top of a Ferris wheel in season four, episode nineteen of  _ It’s Always Sunny on Europa,  _ which was their musical episode and  _ oh _ Harry Urbana’s footwork in the song about scraping gum off the underside of bleachers was to  _ die for _ Mista Steel—”

“Rita,” Juno drops his pen and pushes off against the side of the desk, sending his chair rolling toward the door between the lobby and his office. He leans just past the doorframe and raises an eyebrow. “You said you had to ask me something?”

“Oh!” Rita blinks up at him. She’s elbow-deep in a bowl of popcorn with her right arm and transcribing Juno’s last case report with her left. “Right, yeah,  _ so.  _ I knew the answer and I  _ maaay _ have rigged up a little something to make sure my comms went through at  _ just  _ the right time to be the two hundred and twenty-sixth caller but  _ in my defense,  _ I have seen that episode more times than you can count so really, it was rightfully mine and—”

“Rita!”

“And I won!” She beams. Then she rewards herself with a mouthful of buttery snacks. “I won two tickets to the Adonis Spa and Resort—all expenses paid—for a week,” she concludes—or at least, that’s what Juno makes out of it. Between its rapid output and sheer cubic volume, sometimes he thinks her mouth must be automated and subsidized by the city, but even a woman of Rita’s talents has trouble with diction around a fistful of popcorn.

“So you need time off,” Juno says. He’s already mentally mapping out his current caseload, wondering what he can tackle alone and what he can finish up soon enough to see her off. Mx Orkin won’t need that invoice for a couple of days, although if Rita has to be at the spaceport early in the morning—

“Well, that’s the thing, see,” Rita swallows her snack all at once with a cartoonish _gulp,_ “because Franny called me this morning to say that _she_ won this week’s contest! And not for nothin’, but it was about a movie I made her watch and she and I always said, if one of us ever won one of these things we’d take the other. So we’re going to _Chironian Adventureland_ instead.” When she says the name of the amusement park, her eyes bug out like extending telescopes doing their level best to see the place from here.

“Well hey, good for you.” Juno sets himself to the task of scooting the rolling chair back across his office. “Let me know when you’re leaving, we can figure out—”

“But that’s not what I wanted to ask you, boss!” 

Juno freezes, a foot from his desk, and decides to finally stand up if he’s going to all of this trouble anyway. He sighs. “What is it?”

“Well, we’re taking Franny’s tickets, but I still have mine. The trips overlap by a couple’a days, though, and she’s not really a spa kinda girl, and I wouldn’t leave you for that long either, so I figured I’d ask,” she leans down and pulls out an envelope from her purse, “do you want them?”

Juno blinks.

“I’m not really a spa kind of girl either,” is the first thing that comes out of his mouth. Rita’s face does something that might be a frown if the muscles there had ever heard of it.

“But you work so  _ hard, _ Mista Steel, and we’ve been doin’ so good lately, and you’re eating better and going out and—” She smiles, and her voice goes light and sing-song. “And I figured that fella of yours might be interested.”

Juno scowls and shuts the office door.

He opens it two minutes later, hat jammed on his head, and grabs the envelope on his way out.

 

-

 

Juno has a plan for how he’s going to bring this up to Nureyev. He has a plan, and a good one, too: Peter gets home tonight, and given how late his spaceshuttle flight is scheduled to arrive, Juno will definitely be home first. So all he has to do is set Rita’s envelope out on the counter—near a pile of other mail, but not too close—and say something like, “oh hey, Peter, totally forgot about this but—” with a casual lean and a carefully constructed disinterest. He’ll recount Rita’s story, downshifted a gear or two, and point out that interplanetary con artistry doesn’t usually have the tightest schedule, so he could probably manage to get himself to Venus for a week without much trouble, what the hell, right?—

A faceful of blinding dust and a punch to the windpipe while tracking down a client’s thieving stage magician cousin weren’t on the schedule for tonight, funnily enough. He gets them anyway—and an extra long walk home to boot, with how often he has to bend over with his hands on his knees and cough up two-cred glitter.

He misses Peter’s arrival, because of course he does. He shrugs internally and figures the plan can wait, can be edited to say the envelope has been riding around in his coat pocket instead. It’s not  _ so  _ much of a lie; Juno might even be able to make it convincing.

It all goes out the window in the span of eight seconds. Juno opens the door, then there’s a pair of long arms winding around his waist and a tall man he hasn’t seen in weeks kissing him breathless.

He’s dozing against Peter’s collarbone an indeterminate amount of time later, half on his lap, tie gone and shoes kicked off, the sting of a hickey blooming satisfyingly on his neck.

“Cancri has a stunning art gallery built into a system of lava tubes. It winds its way below the surface of the capital city. They say—” Peter says around a yawn, “—its rooms extend deeper underneath the surface than the tallest buildings above.” 

It’s a ritual of theirs, or something like it: Peter spins a tale for Juno of everything he’s seen while away, lays it at his feet like an offering. He has a way of turning even Juno’s musty sofa into a stage, a hilltop, an amphitheater—and Juno himself into a spellbound audience.

“If you stole anything from them,” Juno mumbles, “don’t you dare tell me.”

Peter chuckles. The sound vibrates the bones of his chest; Juno can feel it against himself, a man’s quiet laughter humming in the empty spaces inside his body. There are long fingers in his hair, skimming across his scalp in easy motions.

“I don’t know, darling, fleeing from the law sounds quite thrilling right now. I haven’t had a proper rooftop chase in—” he yawns again; the shoulder under Juno’s cheek dips softly, “—years.”

“You just got back,” Juno grumbles. He shoves his face into Peter’s shirt because he’s had a long day and he’s tired and he missed him, okay, he admits it. He missed him a lot. Even after all this time, the closest he can come to putting it into words is a cranky, “if you go running off again, I’ll cuff you myself.”

Peter gives a thoughtful  _ hm,  _ and Juno feels a sharp grin against his forehead. “Is that a promise, detective?”

There’s no real intent behind the quip, but he pushes against Juno and topples them both over. Peter is sprawled across him like a collapsed circus tent, too many limbs but not enough weight to be uncomfortable.

Juno is tired and warm and laughing, just a little bit. He’s gotten more accustomed to the way a smile feels on his face over the last few months; it’s barely strange enough to be worth noticing by now. And Peter is smiling right back. He looks like a fox that got into the chicken coop, if the fox were heavily sedated and in love with the chicken.

He kisses Juno with those lips he’s been gone for since the first time, despite everything. There is a soft palm at the back of Juno’s head, soft breath over his mouth and chin, soft sounds and soft light coming in through the slatted blinds.

Juno has no idea how much time passes—he rarely does, when Peter kisses him like that—but he’s brought back down to Mars when Peter pulls away and asks, “what’s this?”

Juno tips his head back, and it doesn’t take a detective to see what’s happened. His coat was tossed over the arm of the couch at some point soon after he came home; Peter, bracing himself over Juno on that same arm, jostled his coat; his coat, being jostled, spilled out some of its more recent contents. All this, like following bloody footprints at a crime scene, leads to one inevitable, grisly conclusion: Peter, holding up the envelope with Rita’s tickets.

Juno is tired, and kiss-dizzy, and a mediocre liar at the best of times. What comes out of his mouth isn’t the suave act he spent an hour practicing under his breath this afternoon. It’s not an explanation of what happened to foist this free vacation on him, and it’s not even an answer to Peter’s question.

All he manages to say, right in that moment, is:

“Do you want to go to Venus?”

 

-

 

Peter is overjoyed. Of course.

 

-

 

Juno went to Phobos once, years ago, for a case. Cheating spouse, gone in a cloud of red dust for greener pastures and younger partners, worth a handful of creds more than the sum of the debts they left behind, unmemorable in every way except in that it forced Juno to white-knuckle the armrests in a spaceshuttle cabin for forty minutes while trying not to be sick. He tottered around a moon with a population barely bigger than his apartment building for eight hours, sent a few snapshots to his client, raided the nearest Saffron Pharma outlet for whatever would knock him the hell out as quick as possible on the flight back, and to this day can’t remember anything else before three PM the next afternoon.

Besides that, this is his first trip off the surface of Mars.

He snorts awake from an unsatisfyingly hazy sleep to Peter’s long-fingered hand gently shaking his shoulder. The speaker dings dully and their pilot announces the flight has landed on time at Florez-Abner Memorial Interplanetary Spaceport, Venus. The sky is a roiling gray-green and purple above them as Peter and Juno—or officially, for the duration of their stay here, Ira and Enid Nova—pull their bags from the rotating track and head toward the stop for the resort bus.

“You usually hate having to use an alias,” Peter remarks casually. “Why did you insist on one now? Detective Juno Steel taking a vacation with a handsome gentleman isn’t so suspicious, is it?”

Juno might hesitate if he weren’t still coming down—or is it up? He can’t remember—from a ride on Saffron’s special stuff, but as it is he doesn’t think before replying, “I’m, uh, not technically allowed here. On Venus. Legally.”

Peter pauses. He turns on one heel, hand braced against the handle of his suitcase, and stares down at Juno.

“I’m sorry, darling, I must have misheard you.” There’s curiosity and surprise in his voice, of course, but also a rising edge of glee that Juno knows will be very irritating very shortly. “Did you say… You’re not  _ legally  _ allowed on this planet?”

“I might have mugged the president once. Long story.” He jabs a finger at Peter’s delighted face. “It was Vicky’s fault.”

“I’m certain it was.” Juno knows he hasn’t heard the end of this, but the bus is pulling up and too many people are milling around and Peter is actually pretty good at dropping something when Juno needs him to.

It’s nearing on sunset when they get to their room—not real Venusian sunset, that’s still about two months out, but a dimming of the dome before it turns opaque to keep the inhabitants of the planet from getting strung out and sun-crazy during the half-year-long days. He learned that from a travel pamphlet at the spaceport. 

Juno is wiped out and a little queasy after the day’s travel, but Peter insists that they sit by the pool as the balmy steam of the hot spring balloons into the evening air around them. 

Even Juno has to admit, it’s… Nice.

It’s nicer still the next morning. Artificial birdsong from actual artificial birds floats through their window, and while Juno has less of a headache than last time, he can’t help but remember having this exact fantasy: waking up at a hot spring on Venus, late in the morning, and Nureyev—

There’s a tiny twinge of fear, just for a second. It’s irrational, he knows it, but Juno can’t help wondering if he did it again. Deluded himself. Built up this whole damn castle in the sky to run away from the inescapable trash fire  _ he  _ lit in the first place, hoping so hard for a happy ending that will never exist.

The worry deflates in an instant at the feeling of Peter’s lips on his neck.

As it turns out, this vacation thing? Not so bad. Juno isn’t afraid of torture, so he’s never going to admit it, but he kind of gets what all the hype is about now. Going off-world, seeing the sights, nobody breathing down his neck or throwing a punch he’s just too slow to dodge—a lady could get used to this.

They go swimming and get massages; Peter fucks Juno into a mattress bigger than his entire kitchen; they sip on drinks with a startling amount of sugar and an even more startling alcohol content; the light fades over a lake you wouldn’t want to dip your toe in unless you’re looking to melt the skin clean off, but it’s pretty. It’s pretty, and Peter is pretty, and this entire vacation bullshit was, Juno concedes, a half decent idea.

He’ll have to thank Rita tomorrow—or the day after; Juno should double check what time their flight gets in. He knows he has a buffer day blocked off to give whatever he’ll be self-medicating with time to get out of his system. 

But that’s a thought for the morning. Right now, Juno is feeling something unfamiliar. Or—no, it’s really the absence of something that’s unusual. Along the way, he seems to have lost a few thousand PSI of tension in his shoulders and, for once, the volume on his running list of responsibilities played back-to-back with a supercut of Juno Steel’s Greatest Failures, Live in Living Color has been knocked down to gentle static.

Relaxed, might be the word. Huh. He’d always assumed that was for other people.

“Thanks,” Juno hedges as the door to their room swings open and the light clicks on. He clears his throat, glances at Nureyev. “For, uh, coming along on this whole… thing.”

“It’s my pleasure, Juno,” Peter yawns, stretching slow and lithe. Juno is about to ask what time they need to leave for the spaceport when Peter continues with a question: “What would you like to do tomorrow?”

“T-Tomorrow?” Juno looks at their suitcases, still in the corner and barely unzipped, then at the bed, where his sweats from the flight here are still draped over the corner of the mattress, and back to Peter, who returns the stare quizzically. He can’t help but think of a crime scene, evidence staring him down with accusation.

“Yes, Juno. We’ve been here one day. There are six left.”

Juno turns and stares out their veranda window for a long several seconds.

“Oh. Right.”

 

-

 

So. As it turns out, the line between ‘relaxed’ and ‘bored out of his goddamn skull’ is a thin one, and Juno passed it about fourteen thousand miles back.

It was alright to start. Juno figured, hell, six more days of this? He can do that. If one was enough to loosen him up, maybe another would work the same magic. He’s got Nureyev, a fully stocked bar, and nothing to distract him from either one except the other. 

But here’s the thing about relaxing, which Juno is just now getting the opportunity to learn: it looks a hell of a lot like stagnation.

Juno knows he has bad days. He’d have to be an idiot who had also never once looked in a mirror to miss that fact. But the thing is, the thing  _ is,  _ this isn’t one of them. It’s not anything like a day where the sun comes up to find him in his underwear on the couch and sets to the same thing with nothing but another layer of 5 o’clock shadow and an aching back to show for it. He’s actually motivated to get out of bed, comb his hair, be the one to start a conversation with Peter, do something that isn’t hating himself and stewing in it.

It hasn’t been one of the days where time bleeds like ink in water, not for a suspiciously long while, actually, so Juno’s brain is too, too busy counting out the seconds and his eye is looking for patterns in the cloudless blue plastic sky above him, wound tight with his fists clenched on either side of a reclining pool chair next to Nureyev—

Nureyev, who is on his second mimosa and looks entirely oblivious to the fact that Juno is unraveling two feet away.

Juno’s mind turns to the cases he left open. There’s nothing too exciting there, which he did on purpose for the sake of this trip, but now he’s wondering if there isn’t some clue he missed in Abigail Dixon’s missing parakeet. Maybe the bird didn’t fly away; maybe it was kidnapped.  _ Maybe  _ it was confused for someone else’s pet—a coincidentally identical one owned by a high powered real estate salesman, who is right at this very moment reading a ransom note for a parakeet that hasn’t left his side.

“They got the wrong  _ bird,”  _ Juno mutters to himself. Out loud. He clamps his jaw shut and slowly looks over to Nureyev, who is peering at him over the top of his sunglasses.

“Did you say something, Juno?"   


“Uh, nope,” Juno lies. There’s a shadow of a knowing smirk on Peter’s face. It’s a good look on him, the bastard.

“Would you like to take a walk with me?” He’s already reaching for his shoes.

“Yup, absolutely, let’s go.”

 

-

 

There’s a garden out back of the resort’s main building. Peter takes Juno’s arm to guide him down a mulch-covered path, past flowers and trees and passionately colorful vines snaking their way through the warm, heavy smell of living things putting down roots in the soil.

It’s pretty. If you like that sort of thing.

Peter certainly seems to. He has an uncanny knowledge about a lot of things—must come with the territory of sliding into a new identity every time he changes his pants—but the way he strolls past clusters of soft, pink flowers and rattles off a name, genus, and planet of origin simple as anything has Juno damn close to impressed.

“Didn’t think you went in so much for botany,” Juno says. Nureyev’s eyes slide toward Juno with a smirk.

“You may not be aware of this, detective, but you’re in the presence of the sole proprietor of one of the Outer Rim’s most prestigious flower shops. Or so the Chancellor of Proxima’s daughter believed when she was planning her wedding.” He leans down, an elegant bend to his spine and the crook of his elbow, and takes a gentle whiff of the nearest blooming plant. “Also, I quite like them.”

“Flowers?” Juno eyes a nearby vine covered in delicate white petals uncertainly.

Peter hums an affirmative.

“Flower gardens represent something more than a green thumb, I think. They serve a purely human purpose. Life for life’s sake.” He appears, suddenly, at Juno’s shoulder and tucks a purple blossom behind one of his ears. “Beauty for beauty’s.”

Juno doesn’t know what to do with that, soft and bright like gently falling petals in the core of him. The edges of the flower are the same color as the eyeshadow he actually bothered to put on today—has been doing more often, actually, bolder shades like Rita always said would look nice on him but he didn’t believe it. 

That’s a tiny intimacy, picking flowers that compliment the effort Juno has made, and he knows Peter too well to convince himself it’s a coincidence. The tiny intimacies are the ones that cut deepest, though—a thousand wounds that bleed out truths he never wanted to let outside himself, and Peter watching them fall like none of it is worth the pity or shame Juno learned early to expect, like a blow to the jaw, or a slamming door, or silence.

Juno wants to clear his throat and look away. He wants to make an excuse to shuffle off, wait for the fire creeping up his neck to the tips of his ears to douse itself. But he’s got nowhere to go, and he’s getting better at admitting to himself what kind of wanting those wants cover up. So he looks up at Peter Nureyev’s lean face, angular in the bright sunlight, and rises to his toes so he can kiss him.

He feels Nureyev smile through the kiss. His teeth catch at Juno’s lips and one hand comes around to grab the back of his neck. Juno clutches Peter’s shoulders, not only because he’s a fair amount shorter, but because the way he holds Juno just on the shy side of impropriety—of downright obscenity, if this spot were a little more public—has him weak in the knees.

Peter’s teeth pinch his earlobe, trail down his neck, scrape right along the spot where Juno knows a knife would slice his windpipe open. And  _ that’s  _ a piece of knowledge he’s never had use for in a situation like this, but it’s one he knows Peter knows as well. 

Another infinitesimal form of intimacy, fucked up as it may be. Another thing he could hurt or be hurt with, but won’t.

“I’m no expert,” Juno gasps, a high note of a whimper lost somewhere in the breath he lets out, “but I thought we had a hotel room for exactly this kind of thing, in case you, I don’t know, forgot how vacations work.”

Peter chuckles. The heat of his breath skims over the exposed edge of Juno’s collar bone.

“I know how vacations work better than some detectives I could name,” he teases. Juno huffs. He opens his mouth to retort—something smart and biting, he’s sure—but forgets every word in the Martian language when strong, slender fingers pinch his ass.

“Nur—!” Juno actually catches himself this time, though Peter’s sharply quirking eyebrow helps. “Nova!” he swerves. “Ira, I mean. Ira, you…” He glances around, sees a knot of three guests also out for a romantic stroll just barely within earshot. “You  _ cad.” _

Both of Peter’s eyebrows are up, now, and edging closer to his hairline as he stifles a laugh.

“You’re incorrigible,” Juno continues. He has never much enjoyed playing into an alias, on the handful of occasions he’s had to go undercover, but Enid Nova is Juno’s own fault. He might as well have a little fun. “Just a real, uh—”

“Scoundrel?” Nureyev grins. Handsomely. Juno hates it.

“Scoundrel is too good for you,” he snaps.

“Really? Nothing roguish about me?” He pouts. “Enid, darling, that’s terribly unfair.”

“You’re a miscreant at best.”

Peter shrugs. “I’ll take it.”

“Not the only thing you can take,” Juno mutters, distracted by the elegant lift of his shoulders. Peter laughs again, a high, sharp  _ ha  _ that Juno only hears when he says something Nureyev finds genuinely surprising.

“If I’m a cad, you’re a wanton, Mr. Nova,” Peter admonishes and takes his arm. Juno flushes to the ears.

“Never denied it,” Juno says. He tucks himself tightly into Peter’s side, because he has no goddamn reason not to.

He’s wrapped up in Nureyev’s cologne like it’s their first meeting all over again, rich and sharp, but not so much that his brain has stopped spinning like a gyroscope at every piece of information it can take in: two girls hoverboarding beneath a sign that clearly says NO HOVERBOARDS; a woman in a sleek bathing suit and garishly neon running shoes, arguing with a man in sunglasses so big they’re sliding down his nose; a small dog, smuggled into the resort in a handbag, greedily snapping up tiny sausages from its owner’s hand from underneath a pool chair; an overflowing trash can.

Little things, little dots on his radar that wouldn’t register except there’s nothing else for miles around.

Well.

Nothing but Nureyev.

Nureyev, who must notice his divided attention, because his hand slides lower on Juno’s back and he leans in to breathe a question in Juno’s ear.

Juno answers with an exhale and a bitten lip. He tugs Peter’s arm, and sooner than should be possible they’re at the door of their room. Juno’s back hits smooth synth-wood, Peter bracing himself over him and staring down with a gaze that slices like the red-hot edge of a knife.

Juno means to say his name—they’re tucked away, nobody’s listening in on a vacationing couple caught up together like this, the world between his body and Nureyev’s can’t exist in a galaxy like the one Juno knows he’ll have to come back to eventually.

What comes out is a moan, but Juno is pretty sure it gets the point across.

There’s a quiet beep and a click from somewhere behind Juno’s elbow, and suddenly the door is swinging open and Nureyev is ushering him inside, “quickly now, love.”

Like everything else when Juno gets like this, what follows is reduced to freeze-frame moments. Snapshots on the wall: a biting kiss, hands on his waist; more evidence, more clues to the secret that connects all things. Juno wraps his arms around Peter and falls back. Peter falls with him.

Nureyev’s hands are everywhere, leaving sparks across Juno’s skin like the burning tails of twin comets. His teeth are white-hot as a dying star. Friction slows the rotation of planets over hundreds and thousands and millions of years, but Juno isn’t a planet, and Nureyev isn’t a force of nature, much as he seems like it. Friction speeds him up, gravity pulls him harder the further apart they are. When Peter Nureyev’s mouth is on his, the laws of physics turn inside out and so does Juno.

Nureyev rises over him in the half-light—window curtains closed, nothing much of a view anyway—like an ancient god out of the deep, a stealer of fire who keeps it in his eyes. Juno’s mixing his mythologies, probably making shit up whole-cloth in the buzzing film reel of his thoughts right now, but he’s no protector goddess himself so he figures it pans out.

Sighs and whispers and low, crooning praise echo around him, from him, pulled from deep inside Juno where Nureyev works his magic and stakes his claim. Where he comes home to. Where Juno brings him home.

 

-

 

It’s late in the afternoon by the time Juno peels himself out of bed. He groans a bit when he rolls off the mattress, not as young as he used to be. Nureyev is still dozing—a satisfied smirk on his face, arm thrown up above his head on the pillow, nipples pink and pert on his bare chest—all of him so slender Juno practically shakes with it.

But as much as he’d love to fuck Peter for the next six days straight, it’s an unrealistic dream. For starters, Nureyev wouldn’t be nearly as keen on spending their whole vacation cooped up in here as Juno; he wants to see the old movie hologram they’re showing over the tennis courts tonight, or whatever.

Juno has reluctantly agreed to tag along.

He sighs and turns on the shower.

The water pressure hovers somewhere between ‘tolerable’ and ‘you weren’t using all that skin anyway, right?’ and the little soaps provided by the resort slip from between Juno’s fingers like tiny fish hopped up on those knockoff Saffron pills kids snort before a big test. He bends down to pick one up, hits his head on the wall, slips, and nearly falls flat on his ass.

“Goddammit—”

“Juno?” There’s a gentle knock at the door. He can just hear Nureyev’s voice over the spray. “Are you alright in there? I heard a noise.”

“I’m fine,” Juno grouses, not going to be undone by a stupid shower at a stupid resort with stupid, dumb,  _ stupid  _ little soaps. There has to be a reason this thing is so hazardous—bad planning? Cutting back on costs? Or something more… malicious?

Juno’s eye flies between the soap in his hand, the smooth shower floor, the hard tile that makes his head throb indignantly. An inconvenient way to stage someone’s death, sure, but not an impossible one. He’s definitely seen weirder, more convoluted plots to make it look like an accident, and if the Venusian government found out he’s here—

Peter’s voice at the door brings Juno back into the present.

“What?” he calls, realizing simultaneously that he has no idea what Nureyev said and also that the water has gone cold. Juno turns the shower handle until the harsh spray stops.

“I asked,  _ ‘may I come in?’ _ ,” Nureyev repeats. “I want to wash up a bit before we go out.”

“Oh,” Juno says. “Yeah. Sure.”

Nureyev opens the door as Juno steps out of the shower, wrapping a towel around his waist. There’s not a lot of room in here, and as he tries to step behind Peter standing at the sink, Juno’s foot lands in a patch of water. His leg jerks forward and he barely has time to think,  _ “figures,”  _ before his body pitches backwards.

Juno is bracing for the tile again when a slender arm slips behind his back. Nureyev’s reflexes have saved his life before, Juno will grudgingly admit, but this is maybe the most embarrassing time he’s needed them.

“Careful,” Peter warns with a smile. His legs are on either side of Juno’s, arm tight around him, bodies hovering too close together. The way Nureyev’s sheer proximity makes Juno feel like he just breathed in a gallon of jet fumes—dizzy, not nauseous—has never faded. Juno’s head still goes rolling across the floor when Peter so much as looks at him sometimes.

He gives Juno a swift kiss after gallantly setting him back on his feet. Juno thinks, in the space between the kiss and turning around to find his pants, that even if Venus  _ is  _ crawling with soap-making assassins, it might be worth it, will be worth it, to have this time with Peter Nureyev.

He could do with a little more excitement, though.

 

—

 

The movie is an old classic, which Juno knows because he’s caught most of it—completely out of order, over the course of a decade—on Rita’s streams. It’s pretty good, as far as movies go, although most of the people watching from scattered lawn chairs don’t seem overly impressed.

“We can do something else if you’re bored,” Juno says to Peter in his best, low, movie-going voice.

Peter looks back at him, eyebrows up.

“I’m having a lovely time, actually,” he whispers. “I haven’t seen this movie in years, though it’s holding up well from what I remember. Why?”

“But you’re just, you know,” Juno waves his hand toward Peter in an all-encompassing gesture, “just sitting there.”

“Yes, I’m sitting here quietly, enjoying the film.” He says it like that’s the most obvious thing in the world. Juno’s brow furrows.

“Enjoying the film,” Juno repeats doubtfully. “You haven’t said a word the whole time we’ve been here! No… no jokes about that actor’s hair, or trying to remember the next line from the last time you saw it— You didn’t even gasp when the guy with the sword showed up!”

“Hey, lady!” someone two chairs over hisses. Juno recognizes them as the person who was feeding their dog sausages next to the pool earlier that day. “Mind keeping it down? Some of us are trying to pay attention.”

“Yeah? Maybe start sounding like it,” Juno snaps back. They blink, dumbfounded, and go back to their low-sodium popcorn.

“Enid,” Peter says slowly. It takes Juno a couple of seconds to remember, Oh right, that’s him. “Explain to me, if you would, what you think the etiquette for seeing movies is.”

“I’ve  _ been  _ to movies before, thank you,  _ Ira,”  _ Juno replies. “You get a snack, sit down in the theater, and whichever one of you is paying more attention explains everything that’s going on and who all the characters are to the other person until it’s over. Obviously.”

Peter closes his eyes for a long few seconds. The holo-screen is on Juno’s blind side, but the flickering light plays over Nureyev’s face in a way that makes it very hard to be irritated with him. Even when he looks like he’s trying not to laugh.

“And who,” Peter opens his eyes again, “do you usually have accompanying you to the theater?”

“...Just Rita.”

Peter nods and turns back to the screen. A smile plays at the corners of his mouth; his bright eyes are glimmering.

“Let me show you how the rest of the galaxy does it, hm?”

Juno crosses his arms and settles lower in the chair. “Sounds alright,” he says.

So Juno follows Nureyev’s example: shuts his mouth and watches the movie, and it’s— Not bad, actually. Hell, he finds himself getting invested in the stakes of whatever the upcoming climax is supposed to be. He’s missing a lot of exposition, but piecing it together feels like a puzzle to solve; it feels like a case. He might be more inclined to those evenings when Rita drags him to the theater, he thinks, if somebody cut out the first half hour of every movie and left the rest up to the audience to figure out on their own.

Everything is set in motion, wheels turning toward the final scene that might be a wedding and might be a robbery—Juno still isn’t sure—when someone starts screaming.

Nureyev and Juno are out of their seats in less time than it takes for most of the crowd to turn their heads. Peter’s hand is hovering over his left pocket, where Juno knows he keeps at least two knives, depending on the day. Juno, for his part, reaches for a gun that isn’t there, already running in the direction of the screams.

He doesn’t have to run far. The movie was set up on the beach, facing away from the rolling acid lake and just far enough that the sound of sizzling waves wouldn’t mess with the audio quality. The distance from his seat to the shoreline is barely a jog.

The first thing he sees is the giant handbag, with a small, fuzzy white head peeking out curiously. The second thing is a bag of popcorn spilled across the ground. The third is the pile of foam, suspiciously dark and a little too slick in the dim light of artificial evening, nearly lapping at the sandal-clad shoes of the handbag-dog’s owner.

“I think that’s blood!” Handbag screeches. It’s a redundant thing to say, from the way Juno’s stomach roils as the smell reaches him and the discolored sand tilts beneath his feet.

There are resort security staff already running closer. Juno’s eye drifts toward the sound of their footsteps, and on the way there, he spots one more thing of note: a pair of running shoes, so obnoxiously orange they’re unmistakable. One shoe lies on its side, the tip of the toe already eaten away as the tide comes in.

He turns to look back slowly. There’s Peter, further up the beach. Gangly and still, wind off the sea whipping his hair around his face—and behind him, like a mirror, cold and thin and tall, a sign. 

NO SWIMMING. 

Some sick part of Juno, underneath the forced relaxation and the echo of  _ blood, blood, blood,  _ thinks,  _ “It’s about damn time.” _


End file.
